Name: Piper
Project title: Making a music documentary.
Project overview:
The 2020 covid quarantine, pandemic times, and ample free hours plunged me into a rabbit hole of living vicariously through films. Though I sat alone in my room, my face illuminated by a small laptop screen, I could feel the vibrancy of people and communities flickering before my eyes, and felt this liveliness especially so in documentaries. To watch real stories unfold so beautifully instilled hope in me for the post-pandemic future, and provided me with a great love for cinema. The more movies I watched, the more intrigued I became, and I began to turn towards film theory, video essays, etc., hoping to find a deeper understanding of what was being presented to me. I found myself particularly fascinated by the direct cinema and cinema verite documentaries and movement of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. This film movement created impacts spanning across many countries, and has coined and revolutionized a multitude of theories and techniques, as well as accumulated an inspired fanbase. While I have read some film theory, I’ve lacked focus on theory focusing specifically on documentaries, something I hope to change in the upcoming weeks during my senior project.
Through this project I intend to deepen my understanding of the uses of documentary filmmaking by engaging in the process itself. I have learned in my years at LREI that to fully understand something, a form of engagement and creativity within a study is necessary. I cannot call myself a seasoned filmmaker, but through watching movies like Jazz on a Summer’s Day by Bert Stern, and Don’t Look Back by D.A. Pennebaker, in addition to reading books such as “Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema” by Thomas Cohen, and critical essays like “It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: ‘Rockumentary’, Direct Cinema, and Performative Display” by Keith Beattie, I hope to learn about and gain the ability to implement techniques and the ideas behind documentary.
The documentary I will create will highlight the creative processes of young musicians writing and recording an album. The film will center my friends Z Fluger and Elijah Meltzer, and will emulate the style of direct cinema and cinema verite.
Through my senior project I also intend to answer the question: “Is direct cinema still valuable in an age of constant and easily accessible methods of documentation?” I am choosing to imitate techniques used in documentaries directed by Agnes Varda, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, but these films were created in a different time with different technology. Today, the means of documentation and the sharing of such information has become much more accessible through smartphones, cheap cameras, and social media. While I do not intend to focus the film nor most of my writing on this question, I will continuously consider it as I am making a film that is rooted in a medium that once was necessary, but may have become extinct. Direct cinema finds its roots in a surveillance style of filmmaking, however today so much of people’s activity is surveilled by means other than movies. I wonder if the artful and conscious consolidation of information in a current direct cinema documentary will negate increasingly harmful impacts of surveillance, and create a form that is dissimilar from “vlogs” on youtube, and short videos on instagram and tiktok. Because of this I hope to lean towards techniques of cinema verite and the later documentaries of D.A. Pennebaker, in which the director/camera more frequently collaborates with the film’s subject, in this case musicians Z and Elijah, rather than just observing said subjects.
To measure the success of my project, I hope to find answers to this question, and, most importantly, I hope to complete the film about Z and Elijah’s creative process and album. By the end of the senior project period I intend to complete watching the films, and reading the essays and books listed on my annotated bibliography. I will also be completing the documentary I set out to create, and hope to construct a follow up piece of writing that contextualizes the film with the prior research done and the questions I came up with; however I want the film to be able to stand alone, without writing, as I believe every good movie should be able to do.